budaya

As usual, the issue of Malay identity continues to be a hot topic here in Malaysia. Just thought I'd share with you guys a couple of videos I found of YouTube that make for interesting observations.

In this clip from 1952, we hear R. Azmi singing in a jazzy, big band style identical to what was in vogue in Hollywood.
A couple of years later, we see a shift. Though male characters continued to dress like they were in Harlem, you could hear a starkly different sound. In this clip, not only do you not hear anything remotely jazzy (despite the jazz band depicted), the musical style was, if not almost like ramvong. Ramvong is a musical genre popular till today in the Indochinese region (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia), with whole channels devoted to it. Just in case you missed it, the female voice also grew a lot shriller.

For the modern Malaysian, the joget sequence, with the strange music and dance style, will likely appear very odd. You could even say that by today's standards, it is not very 'Malay'.
p/s the word budaya itself came from the sanskrit 'buddhi' meaning 'of intelligence'

some things just makes you wonder, or worse, worry about the state of today’s youths. Take for example these lyrics from the song “Waiting For The World To Change”, written and performed by John Mayer, taken from his latest album “Continuum”

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there's no way we ever could
now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

he goes on:

it's hard to beat the system
when we're standing at a distance
so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change

and the chorus - here’s the clincher:

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

Something’s just not right here. ‘Waiting’? Just plain ‘waiting’? Waiting for what? Bulan jatuh ke riba? Sorry to say this, but if that’s your idea of a protest song, it’s quite a non-starter isn’t it? Or in parlance you may understand, it’s just lame, geddit?

Go listen to Bob Dylan or something.

To be fair, here’s what the man himself has to say about his song :

“With “Waiting on the World to Change”, Mayer shot for something even more ambitious - something like an attempt to explain his generation’s attitudes about politics. “It’s meant to shed a little light on inactivity and inaction,” he says, “because I don’t believe that inaction is disinterest, I think inaction is preservation – nobody wants to get involved in a debate in which the rules and the facts will change so that they’ll lose. So we end up with this other option, which is, I guess we’ll just have to wait for things to get better.”

what~ever.